Painting, painting, painting

Last week, we (FINALLY) closed on our house. After taking a while on Thursday of last week to sign all the paperwork, on Friday, at 2:00 PM, everything went through, and Husband and I now own our first house. We immediately went into makeover mode. As everyone knows, we were going to paint, and I so didn’t want to. But hiring painters didn’t work out in my favor, because Husband didn’t want to. Ugh. So we painted a little over the weekend, (only a little, because the city had turned off our water, and its difficult to clean brushes with no water) and then on Monday, really tackled it. And by we, I mean Husband painted. I warned IN ADVANCE that I wouldn’t be painting, that I hated it more than anything, ever. So I spent the week cleaning the house (drawers, etc) while Husband, Sister and Sister’s Fiancé painted. We were doing ok, we ragtag bunch of painters, until we realized Wednesday that we needed the house painting done by Thursday night, so we could steam clean the carpets the next morning, and have them dry by the time we were going to move in on Saturday.

So we all took Thursday off of work, and went into super-painting mode. By this point, all of my drawers and cabinets were clean, so I had to jump onto the paint train. Since I still hate to paint (yeah, this didn’t change) I was mostly in charge of taping off the trim, painting the trim, and general clean-up. We got started early, at like, 9 or so. We were also joined by Brother-in-Law, that was a help. So all the guys are downstairs, doing all the big painting of stuff, and Rory and I are upstairs, cleaning up all the mess from the wallpaper (that took about 3 days to get off the wall), doing the trim, and just working in general. As we’re cleaning up the final bits, I look down at the carpet, and see red splotches all over. Let me preface this with, the night before, as we were painting with the cranberry color, someone stepped in the paint and tracked it all over the light blue carpeting. That made me upset, but seeing it happen again today, I just about flipped my lid. So after I spent some time screaming at everyone (I had to yell, seeing as how we were all in different rooms!) I look down, and notice that its on this thing where I had just stood. So I look down, and its not paint – I had apparently sliced open my foot at some point (but didn’t feel it, or register it, I guess) and I had been bleeding all over the place. So after I apologized to everyone and got it all cleaned up, we kept cleaning. After a couple of hours, the upstairs was totally painted, the floor was finally wallpaper-free and clean, and everything was done. We stopped then, and had lunch.

Then, the rest of the house. At this point we lost Brother-in-Law, he had other things, so it was the 4 of us again. We taped, and painted, and sung, and talked, and worked tirelessly for a long time. It got to be about 6-ish before I started to lose it. At this point, I was sick of painting, I was sick of taping, I was sick of being in the super hot house (we couldn’t have the AC on in the house, because the guys installing carpet were having an issue with the AC and the carpet. Plus we needed windows open for ventilation). So this is when the mood turned slowly from having semi-fun painting to hating paint and hating the house and hating everyone around me. Needless to say, things got dark. But after an hour or so of a downfall of moods, things picked up. We finally finished the painting and clean up at 9:30. We all slowly shuffled out of the house, burned out, tired, dirty. On the way home though, we stopped at Arctic Circle and got ice cream cones. We all skipped dinner, so you’d think we’d have been starving, but no. I was just ready for bed, and an ice cream cone sounded like the best thing ever.

So now, here we are. The house is done, all that’s left is a little light cleaning, and putting vent covers/outlet switches back onto the walls. And by tomorrow evening, we should be totally moved in. I can’t wait to be moved in there, and I’m just glad that we’re done with all the painting. And here’s to hoping that I’m done with painting for the rest of my life.